Vocational Civics; A Study of Occupations as a Background for the Consideration of a Life-Career (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1919. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER V MANUFACTURING AND THE BUILDING TRADES Alter our earth occupations have done their work in extracting the materials of our natural resources, and after transportation has carried these materials to the big plants, and our banking system has demonstrated its ability to stand back of business enterprises, then comes the work of the great manufacturing and building concerns which take this raw material and transform it for us into a usable form. This occupation has far more branches than any that we have yet studied. Any one of the commodities produced in the earth occupations represents the possibility of many industries. Take the wood from our forests, and we have lumber mills, paper mills, furniture factories, building trades, wagon works; take the stock farms, and we have packing houses, with their immense manufacture of by-products besides the leather business, the great shoe and glove industry and many others; take the mines, and we have gigantic iron works and steel mills with all that come from them, the making of machines of an infinite variety, besides steel rails, farming implements, automobiles, steel cars, and so on and on we might go until we had spent much time in merely enumerating the products of our tremendous industrial system. Unlike agriculture and even transportation in certain forms, manufacturing did not begin with the earliest history of our country. Such articles as were produced in the colonies were made almost entirely by hand and in the home. One exception to this is the shipbuilding industry, which began and reached importance rather early. By slow degrees this business of making things left the home, found lodgment in small shops, then in larger shops, until now we have an industrial system far beyond the wildest imagi...